Integrated Physiological, Genetic and Demographic Responses to Long-Term Habitat Change

通过这个研究项目，PI试图了解决定种群命运的生态、生理和遗传健康措施。这项研究将为为什么一些种群繁荣发展，而另一些种群在类似的栖息地枯萎并最终灭绝的问题提供答案。这项研究的另一个目标是利用过去20年收集的冰冻组织来测试包括健康和下降人口在内的个人的生理健康和遗传状态。最终，这项研究将产生更好的预测能力，通过考虑个体的生理和基因签名，来预测动物如何在它们的风景中移动，利用资源，以及如何在野外生存。PI的事业将涉及许多高中生和大学生，以及攻读理科硕士或博士学位的研究生。在20世纪末和21世纪初，人类对环境景观的全面变化对生物及其种群构成了紧迫的挑战。对于不适宜和正在瓦解的栖息地，生物的潜在反应是迁徙、灭亡、生态适应或进化适应。在这些种群结果中预测需要进行长期研究，在这些研究中，物种、人口学、生理学、生态学和遗传变异性在栖息地变化之前和期间都得到了监测。PIS将从1976年到现在关于生理过程和生活史特征变化的长期时空数据与种群健康的遗传标记相结合，以开发一个框架，将生理学、遗传学和人口学结合起来预测面临栖息地退化的种群的反应。此外，他们将结合个人状态变量的测量(生理可塑性、基因和适应性测量)，将个人水平的状态和个体之间的异质性与群体水平的人口学联系起来。他们将通过对居住在内华达山脉东北部的吊袜带蛇的复制种群进行挖掘或长期组织和DNA收集，来实现测量长期健康指数的目标。为了实现综合目标，将开发和利用具有结构方程建模和其他建模方法的数学模型。这将导致生理和遗传变异、生物生活史变异和环境变异之间的关系的完全联系的模型。

With this research project, the PI seeks to understand the ecological, physiological, and genetic health measures that determine a population's fate. This research will result in an answer to the question why some populations thrive and grow, whereas others, in similar habitats, wither and ultimately go extinct. Another goal of this research is to utilize collections of frozen tissue collected over the past two decades to test for physiological health and genetic state of the individuals that comprise both healthy and declining populations. Ultimately, this research will result in a better predictive power about how animals move across their landscapes, utilize resources, and persist in the wild by taking into consideration the physiological and genetic signatures of individuals. The PI's undertakings will involve many high school and college students, as well as graduate students working towards their master-of-science or doctorate degrees. Sweeping anthropogenic changes to environmental landscapes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries pose urgent challenges to organisms and their populations. Potential organismal responses to unsuitable and disintegrating habitats are to move, perish, acclimate ecologically, or adapt evolutionarily. Predicting among these population outcomes requires long-term studies in which species, demography, physiology, ecology, and genetic variability have been monitored before as well as during a period of habitat change. The PIs will couple long-term spatial and temporal data, spanning 1976 to present, on variation in physiological processes and life-history traits with genetic markers of population health to develop a framework for integrating physiology, genetics, and demography in predicting responses of populations facing habitat degradation. Furthermore they will couple measures of individual state variables (physiological plasticity, genotype, and fitness measures) to link individual-level states and heterogeneity among individuals to population-level demography. They will accomplish these goals of measuring longterm heath indices by mining or longterm tissue and DNA collections on replicate populations of garter snakes inhabiting the northeastern Sierra Nevada mountain range. To accomplish the synthetic goals, mathematical models with structural equation modeling and additional modeling approaches will be developed and utilized. This will result in a fully-linked model of the relationships among physiological and genetic variation, organismal life-history variation, and environmental variation.